I'm a long-term xcom player, but fairly new to Openxcom. One thing I've noticed is that at the end of a mission, I only ever seem to get one promotion at each level (i.e. only one promotion to sergant, one to captain, etc...) So if I start a new game and immediately recruit an extra 7 soliders (to bring my total to 15), only one will be promoted to Sergeant at the end of the first mission, instead of the 3 I'd expect.
It gets ever weirder if you recruit a lot of soliders fairly quickly. Because you're only getting 1 sergeant promotion after each mission, you don't have a lot of sergeants to then be promoted to officers. I've got one new game where I've got 33 soldiers... but only 1 Cdr, 1 Col, 1 Capt and 1 Sgt! (I'd expect 3 Capts and 6 Sgts.)
Can anyone tell me if this is a bug, or a deliberate feature? (And if it is a feature, can anyone tell me why?)